New Zealand Post works with SAS® to create Genius™

A SAS powered New Zealand Post initiative delivers a Customer Intelligence solution that segments consumers down to a sub-meshblock level.

New Zealand Post is a state owned business enterprise established in 1987 with the corporatisation of the New Zealand Post Office, then a government department. New Zealand Post continues in its traditional role as the nation’s main postal service and has diversified into banking and courier services; managing the country’s electoral rolls; and providing technology systems and data management services in New Zealand, Australia and, more recently, a presence in Asia.&nbsp; In addition to over 300 New Zealand Post-owned and franchise PostShop and Kiwibank sites, New Zealand Post has arrangements with over 600 private retailers for providing PostCentre postal services, and over 1,500 stamp resellers.

Using SAS, we are able to segment the data to offer our customers the ability to more accurately pinpoint new prospects or merchandising catchment areas; to better help [marketing] uncover and pursue potential cross-selling and up-selling opportunities; and to design more effective tailored campaigns.

Susan Needham
Analytics Manager

Over the last few years New Zealand Post has grown its one to one marketing capabilities, by introducing a specialist team and a range of direct, digital and data-based marketing solutions for its customers. Part of its expertise is in providing market segment intelligence to businesses engaging in mass marketing campaigns –such as retailers, banks, insurance companies and other financial industry institutions, telemarketing bureaux; and charities; the service is also used by government departments.

Utilising SAS's leading business analytics software, New Zealand Post has recently enhanced these services with the creation of Genius™, a highly sophisticated, purpose-built marketing tool.

While conventional population demographic databases typically segment consumers into geographical units called meshblocks, Genius™ drills down to either the sub meshblock or individual household level. Where other databases may cluster households within a specified geographic boundary, using high level factors such as family size, ages and income, Genius™ uses more than 1,300 variables to profile consumers at a granular level.

Publicly available national Census information provides the core data, but the richness of Genius™ comes from New Zealand Post's annual Lifestyle Survey, which drew more than 200,000 individual consumer responses in 2009, its inaugural year. The database is continuously updated with feeds from a range of commercially available sources such as BNZ MarketView and PropertyIQ, as well as New Zealand Post's own proprietary data.

New Zealand Post engaged SAS solutions and expertise to maximise the application and value of all this data.

Genius™ offers marketing organisations a very high level of intelligence says New Zealand Post Analytics Manager, Susan Needham. "Using SAS, we are able to segment the data to offer our customers the ability to more accurately pinpoint new prospects or merchandising catchment areas, to better help them uncover and pursue potential cross-selling and up-selling opportunities and to design more effective tailored campaigns."

Using SAS, New Zealand Post separates 1.4 million households into nine profile clusters and 36 different segments, each with a distinct personality, which Susan says gives Genius™ users a very accurate picture of where and how they can best target a proposition.

“Whereas other market services can display the location of a target segment of, say, 40 or 50 households within a general geographic area, SAS-based Genius™ can filter to sub-meshblock level and in some instances, down through city, suburb and street to precisely target a single household.”

Genius™ has been extremely well received by both existing and new users of New Zealand Post's services, and extensions are already being developed.

Solution

Benefits

Very positive initial acceptance of the new solution by both existing and new New Zealand Post customers.

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